Revell Snap-Together T.I.E. Fighter

[rbeach84]

Like they always say "As soon as you finish your scratchbuilt model, someone will release a kit of it!"
In this situation, the R2 folks have revamped the original kit to make it more accurate to the filming miniature with cleaned up "solar" panels, etc Plus a revamped Vader figure... just saw it at the local HobbyTown USA.
Go figure!

R/ Robert

 

[JimmyB]

Another tidbit is the Revell X-1 "Vader" TIE kit (85-1857) is the same size (scale) as the Revell Standard TIE as it shares the same cockpit parts. Just has a Vader pilot figure instead, of course. I am using it to build a TIE Bomber model since, being 93% the size of the MPC kit used in the original SS filming miniature, the fuselage tubes are a perfect match for Schedule 40 PVC pipe which makes my life easier!

So it's feasible to cut the cockpit ball from a Revell TIE fighter to replace the awful Revell TIE X1 ball and have a matching set (and the wing connectors, probably)?

Great job on the Revell TIE, whiskeyrat. I've tried to do similar but yours is much better.

 

[rbeach84]

Could be.... hmmm. Wasn't the ILM X-1 miniature made from a standard TIE fighter? You could probably do just that, replicating the model shop's process.
What makes the X-1 kit's 'ball' awful, Jimmy B?
Cheers and Regards, Robert

 

[JimmyB]

Could be.... hmmm. Wasn't the ILM X-1 miniature made from a standard TIE fighter? You could probably do just that, replicating the model shop's process.
What makes the X-1 kit's 'ball' awful, Jimmy B?
Cheers and Regards, Robert

There are no panel lines, and it's a smoothly blended conical shape at the rear instead of a standard TIE conical ring. You can see photos of it here. The cockpit hatch is also pretty terrible. There'd be a lot of other detailing work to do, but they're what scream out at me, anyway. Clearly, the Bandai would be much better (except for the out of scale panel lines), but where's the fun in just glueing a kit together?

With the Revell kit, I don't stress too much about inaccuracies in the greeble parts because my philosophy is if ILM had had to build a 1/72-ish scale TIE for a shoot in the 70s and 80s, they would have only used similar looking smaller scale parts from their boxes of kits anyway which we see in actual versions of miniatures: a kind of "what if" studio scale miniature is good enough for my shelf as long as it looks the same when I squint my eyes lol.

As an aside, Super Hobby, which I linked to above, is very useful for when you want to see what's inside a box. They have sprue scans with a ruler for every kit they ever stocked, so you can get a good idea of what kits to consider if you're kitbashing or scratchbuilding a project.

EDIT: I just did a quick measurement on my monitor screen of both the TIE fighter and Vader ball diameters using the Super Hobby photos, and the Vader TIE seems to be quite a bit smaller, so the idea of swapping balls is busted anyway

 

[rbeach84]

I should point out that the link you gave is for the smaller Revell kit, not the one I was referring to, which was boxed at least twice under different kit numbers (85-1857 & 85-1878 being the two I have on hand...). Scalemates lists about five different boxings, all labeled at "1/57" scale, though they are obviously more like 1/32 scale...
<Darth Vader's TIE Fighter, Revell 85-1878 (2012)>

One issue that Super-Hobby lists is Revell #66780, so you can see the difference:
<Captcha>

Hope this helps!

Regards, Robert

​

 

[JimmyB]

That's interesting, thanks. The cockpit ball for 06780 is almost twice as wide, but it seems to be exactly the same as the smaller versions, as if they rescaled a CAD model to make larger injection moulds. What's frustrating is we know Revell can do accurate work because they did a great job with the 1/35 First Order Special Forces TIE.